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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Related personal story: I have severe obstructive sleep apena (OSA), and I went for several years before it was diagnosed.

During this time, it was not unusual for me to get very little sleep many days in a row. As a coping mechanism, I learned somewhat to "half-sleep", where I would close one eye and relax that side while continuing to do things using the other eye.

I wouldn't consider it sleeping just on one side of the brain, but there was definitely something different going on. I found that 2-4 hours of that would help my overall wakefulness.

Fortunately I had my condition addressed, but it would have been interesting to see if over time I would have developed into a full sleep-wake state of consciousness.

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I find myself doing that when very tired or under significant social stress, but you're right, the structure of the brain can't support that interpretation directly.

I imagine that your brain could easily be experiencing it as a cue for self-trained rest states, so I don't want to misunderstand your experience as identical to my own, especially if you're doing it for 2-4 hours a stretch. My own interpretation of what is going on when I do it has been that it simply reduces (a) cognitive load (maybe) and (b) unnoticed eyestrain (more likely) by eliminating any attempt at depth perception.

> As a coping mechanism, I learned somewhat to "half-sleep", where I would close one eye and relax that side while continuing to do things using the other eye.

That is intriguing. Can you share some techniques on doing this? If I try to close one eye only, my brain would be full engage just to keep the one eye closed.

I'm pretty sure I have sleep apnea as well, and I've done something similar. I will often let my right eye stay closed while I'm getting ready for work, or going places that aren't work, and that seems to satisfy part of my brain that demands sleep otherwise.

It actually takes some effort to keep my left eye closed, but for some reason its super easy to keep my right eye closed and takes pretty much no effort at all. So it might be a biological thing. I also struggled to keep my left eye open enough to put contacts in it back when I bothered using contacts.

This is amazing. My initial response to this was, "That's weird, I haven't experienced that." But, thinking back to being a teenager and getting little sleep because I was up on the internet all night, I remember taking a shower and getting ready in a state of half-consciousness.. and I remember closing one eye.

... me too! And since I read about it in this thread, I also have sleep apnea and ADHD. Very interesting :)

This puts my morning, one-eyed phone gazing in context. It definitely feels harder to get that right eye open for the first 1-2 minutes of being awake when I've been roused by my alarm. When I've had a more natural waking, I definitely don't rely on this crutch nearly as often.

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